Additional features and advantages of the disclosure will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be understood from the description, or can be learned by practice of the herein disclosed principles. The features and advantages of the disclosure can be realized and obtained by means of the instruments and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims. These and other features of the disclosure will become more fully apparent from the following description and appended claims, or can be learned by the practice of the principles set forth herein.
Disclosed are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for presenting a machine translation and alternative translations to a user, where a selection of any particular alternative translation results in the re-ranking of the remaining alternatives. The system then presents these re-ranked alternatives to the user, who can continue proofing the machine translation using the re-ranked alternatives or by providing an improved or alternate translation. This process continues until the user indicates that the current portion of the translation is complete, at which point the system moves to the next portion. The determination that a portion is complete can be decided by direct or indirect input from the user, upon reaching a certain level of confidence, or receiving confirmation from the user that each portion is translated correctly.
As an example, a system configured to practice the method of this disclosure generates a machine translation of a source text as well as a list of alternative translation possibilities. The system then ranks the list of alternative translation possibilities and presents the machine translation and the alternative translation possibilities to a user, who selects the machine translation or one of the alternatives as the preferred translation, or enters a their own translation. The user can be a participant in a collaborative translation of the source text with at least one other human and/or computer-based entity. If the user selects one of the alternative translations listed, the system re-orders or recreates the alternative translations list in a new order based on the user selection.